Yesterday Germany announces that college will be TUITION FREE for all.
Scarcely 24 hrs. have passed and the MSM is now starting the drumbeat to do the same here.
Which must mean it is on the Democrats to-do agenda and the handouts have gone out to the press.
Nothing is free. Somebody is paying for it.
Oh. Right. Beer.
Well, how is German education funded? Do they use tax subsidies? Generous donations? How? I would also add that regular university education is overhyped in the U.S. anyways. We don’t have enough technical or trade jobs. With the majority of trade jobs, you have a cheap tuition, and hardly a fraction of the debt. Then with a few years experience working the trade, you can sometimes be making over $100K annually. If people think they are above a lot of these essential, yet not so badly paying jobs, we are in serious trouble.
I attended public university and never had to take out a student loan. It helped I lived at home.
And of course in the 1980s, tuition fees and textbook fees were still quite reasonable.
Today, you have to be well-heeled to attend college. I’m not sure with all the inflation, the value is significantly higher today.
The fre degrees will be worth what the student pays for it.
Just like today’s “high school diploma” is nothing but an attendance certificate.
Somebody is paying for it namely taxpaying workers.
and then what?
First, if the Universities and Colleges become government services, their costs will ratchet upward and onward. Everyone working for them will be infected with the SEIU virus. There will be few limitations on spending.
Second, is Germany providing “lowest rate” tuition (i.e., zero) to foreigners and illegal aliens? Or will we have to stop with this plan?
For decades, free high-school education helped strengthen the middle class and generate prosperity …Actually, it was the preponderance of domestic manufacturing that created the middle class in the first place. And by saying this, the left is inferring that there is something inherently wrong with home schooling.
When it comes down to it, for most jobs, giving people the textbooks and testing them is all you really need. Education does not have to be that expensive.
I’m not opposed to having someone other than the student pay tuition.
I am opposed to the government becoming the single payer.
If the government becomes the sole payer of tuition, then the government becomes the sole decider who gets their tuition paid for, and that’s something we simply cannot allow.
a high school education alone isn’t nearly as valuable as it used to be,
No sense of irony at all, some of them.
Anything but have to hire the men who were only halfway through their careers when all of this “new normal” and HR movement came along.
Does this mean that the pompous arrogant professors who now wax fat on our tax dollars are going to forgo their salaries? Or does it just mean that the MSM want to further plunder the hardworking to support the irresponible turkeys that colleges seem to graduate in ever greater proportions these days.
Well, (low) tuition was only introduced a few years earlier, university being free for centuries. Also, educational matters are decided at state level in Germany, so "Germany" didn't announce this but one state (Lower Saxony, IIRC). Some states never introduced tuition in the first place. Where it was introduced, the students (predictably) protested, and now the states are caving in one by one. Lastly, Germany isn't alone in charging no or low tuition, as the article points out. Why latch on to a minor change at state level in Germany?
I have a solution:
1. Pass a tough, competitive exam for admission to ANY college.
2. Once passed, serve a complete 6-year term of service in the Armed Forces. Early exit from the term of service voids all rights to free tuition unless injured in the line of duty and medically discharged under honorable conditions. Receive an honorable discharge and a completed term, and you get paid tuition and fees, but NOT books, dorm, or meals, for a bachelor’s degree. An additional 6 year term will pay for another 4 years of tuition and fees.
3. No equivalent service will be accepted.
4. Don’t meet the criteria: pay for it yourself. . .
Let me put the free tuition in Germany into prospective....since I’ve lived here for twenty-odd years as an American.
First, NO German university has any NCAA-related action. No football...no million-dollar coaches...no massive sports complex....no alumni program...no volleyball team for ladies sports...no softball program.
Second, if you screwed around and played drinking games all the way through your first semester...they’d invite you to leave, and you wouldn’t find much sympathy with a second chance.
Third, German university programs don’t have a bunch of support staffs with imaginary job descriptions and ample incomes.
Fourth, towns around the university programs in Germany have a high value on the students...mostly because they go to recruit them to sign up as residents of the town....getting to the 100k, 200k, or 300k level....which means more handouts from the national government. This relationship to the town, makes the university a pull partner of the local city and of value. Most cities run more transit buses through a university district...subways are added...and they are part of the local community.
Fifth. Cops who protect the university...are city cops or state cops. There are no hired thugs or wannabe cops patrolling a German university, nor is the cost dumped onto the college. Nor are the legal proceedings separate. If you do something stupid on a German campus...you get a city judge, and the DA after you....so you don’t have to worry about getting expelled....you get actual real jail-time, with no campus lawyer helping you.
Sixth and final, all these instructors and professors are part of a national level of pensions and benefits. Some guy is watching the whole trend, and ensuring that stupid individual university administrators aren’t lining up some guy for a $300k a year pension deal. If some German governor woke up tomorrow and got wind that some professor in his state is about to retire and get more monthly income than his job....someone would be dragged to the state capital and be asked some pretty difficult questions, and it wouldn’t be a pleasing situation.
They can offer free tuition...the question is....would US university programs be willing to offer the same deal? My guess is...NO. I should point it....it generally takes 4.5 to 5 years to get a bachelor’s degree in Germany. And it’s around seven years if you count in the master’s degree.
I should also note....they also don’t run up bogus ethnic studies degrees, how-to-feel-good physic 116 classes, or Bigfoot studies courses. Got a professor who gets into trouble with some student for relationship woes? They turn the evidence to a state prosecutor and let him handle the mess from that point on...no worries for the university in terms of legal issues.